Friday, November 6, 2009

A little late for ArcHak, but it will hold a special place in a project I'm working on at the moment. I'll write some more about that soon.

The WaveShield can play audio at 22KHz from an SD card and has a socket for headphones and provision for connecting a speaker. The audio data is clocked out of the SD card by an interrupt handler in the Arduino, so the device can also perform other tasks while audio is being played.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

ArcHak

BBC Research and Development, Kingswood Warren

"The objective of the day is to give a dozen or so of the BBC's best coders hackers and designers the data, kit, space and connectivity to invent stimulating and exciting new ideas for ways to present the BBCs archives to a wider world."

The day for me started at 5.00am jumping on the train from Glossop.

Got to Kingswood at about 11:00 where they had just started a round of lightning talks from several people:

Speakers

Libby talked about Infax -

Pete talked about segmentation using the infax catalogue as a data source

Andy talked about DMI and the Million Minutes project which uses a commercial project called Artesia to provide a REST API onto Redux content

Denise talked about Video classification and the Bristol(?) university project which was given 270Gb of archive material to classify.

Paul talked about iStats - which might be interesting to look at for projects such as buzztracker.

Were decoding archived Ceefax data from 1999 which is stored within a data format called TRF of which there is little information. Also aparrently a lot of the archive is on PDP-11 tapes just to make life interesting. If anyone can shed light on the TRF data format, get in touch.

After resisting for a while I decided to have a look and see what all the fuss with the Arduino was all about. I purchased a Freeduino and LCD Shield from eBay.I have been pleasantly surprised by just how easy it is to get started with these devices.The Arduino environment is C based and it's as easy as writing some code or loading a demo and hitting upload. The bootloader on the Freeduino does all the hard work for you.Now, which of my many projects shall I use this for?http://www.freeduino.org/